On seeing Alakananda Roy's Balmiki Pratibha in the Lakes 3 years back. Letter/email written to my daughter...

Dear Priya, 

I went to see Valmiki Pratibha (composed by Rabindranath in his late teens, staged in his house at Jorasanko at that time and Valmiki [who composed the Ramayana] acted by him, and directed this time around, by your Alakananda Aunty. I am attaching a photograph of hers that I took. 

I can't tell you what a brilliant display it was. What masterful choreography. How breathtaking the community participation on the stage. And the actors, the performers and the dancers? Inmates of the Correction Home at Alipore. I hope you know that jails are called Correction Homes, nowadays. 

I knew her as an Odissi dancer before; when you were 7--10 years old, taking you as I did every Saturday afternoon, to her class in Dover Lane. But it is in this brilliant act of humanitarian engagement leading to various kinds of  psychological rehabilitation and reorientation s of marked and pariah peoples, that she has made her signal contribution. I don't know if she received a National Award for this. She should  and a lot more. 

There was a little girl who plays the part of the Balika (little girl) who brings about a transformation in the dacoit Ratnakar, who later turned into the sage Valmiki. Remember how smitten you were with Nigel? Well, he was the original Valmiki of the first/initial staging of this dance drama. This little girl played her part so well, so expertly, and she has been so well taught by her teacher, Alakananda Ray. The reason I mention this, is that i truly applaud her parents, for allowing her to participate in the midst of Correction Home inmates. 

I was seated in the second row; hence, I could watch the wings. A band on her little wrist had come undone. One of the men (convict) tied that band for her so very tenderly, and she smiled a quick, sweet smile to another man standing next to her. Convicts playing convicts. Policemen watched from the wings and from the grounds. 

This occasion had many 'firsts'. In a splendid move to fuse Art with Nature and patronage, some well meaning residents of Kolkata and the Rabindra Sarovar area, have decided to have open air theatre in the Lake area, every Saturday. Ananda-da told me about it yesterday. I took your Bomma and went. Every moment was worth it. 

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom the weaver, has an affair with the Fairy Queen, Titania.  It all happens in  a forest space, at night, and the borders of dream and reality become porous, as all the characters, more or less, but especially Titania and Bottom, are lost in spaces which cannot be translated (or represented) in language. 

But Bottom, recovering from that dream, says, ' Methought I was--there is no man who can tell what Methought I was......The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was'.

I felt that the stage offered these special inmates that chance for a special metamorphosis, when the rough clothes of workaday existence, the suffocating coils of societal punishment could be shaken off, and a glimpse of glorious transformation achieved .